Chapter 7 - A Dialogue with Goya and Daumier

Summary

We discussed in Chapter 3 the artistic milieu of Tbilisi and the pioneering contribution of Schmerling and Rotter to Georgian Critical Realism. In this chapter and the next we look at several other artistic influences on Schmerling and Rotter including the graphic arts of Spain or the satirical periodicals of France, Britain, Germany, and Russia. The illustrations of Mollå Nasreddin belong to a tradition of satirical graphic art that stretches back to early nineteenth-century lithographic work. The artists of the periodical were influenced by the Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746–1828), whose art responded to the republican ideals of the French Revolution and to the French military’s atrocities committed in Spain in the Peninsular War of 1808. By the early twentieth century, Goya had come to influence a generation of artists on the European continent as well as in Russia. The artists of Mollå Nasreddin also drew upon new forms of caricature from European periodicals, such as the French Le Charivari, whose principal artist was Honoré Daumier (1808–79).

The key to the success of this cultural mélange was Mollå Nasreddin’s creative use of the trickster figure as a medium of social criticism. The folk humour of the trickster succeeded because of its ‘grotesque realism’. Powerful targets of folk humour were ridiculed and debased. The ground was levelled so that something newer and better could emerge.

Goya’s Los Caprichos and The Disasters of War

The prints of Mollå Nasreddin can be traced to the tradition of satirical graphic arts that began with the woodcuts and etchings of the British artist William Hogarth (1697–1764) as well as Goya, works that expressed the diverse social and political concerns of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, new technological developments in lithography and a general rise in literacy resulted in the creation of popular illustrated periodicals and journals. Political satire and the art of caricature developed along two distinct French and British styles. In Paris, Le Caricature and Le Charivari printed the illustrations of Daumier and welded Enlightenment traditions onto the burgeoning socialist ideas that came to the fore in the revolutions of 1830, 1848 and 1871 in France. In contrast, the enormously popular British periodical Punch, or The London Charivari (1841–1992), did not reflect the dominant left-wing politics of the Continent, adopting the condescending tone of the British upper classes.